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Rebuilding

the American City

Design and Strategy for the 21st Century Urban Core

David Gamble and Patty Heyda

Welcome

Rebuilding the American City highlights 15 urban design and planning projects in the United States that have been catalysts for their downtowns and were implemented during the tumultuous start of the 21st century—a period marked by renewed interest in cities but also by ongoing social, economic and environmental challenges. The book presents five paradigms for redevelopment and a range of perspectives on the complexities, strategies, successes and challenges inherent to rebuilding American cities today. Rebuilding the American City is essential reading for practitioners and students in urban design, planning and public policy looking for diverse models of urban transformation to create resilient urban cores. Click on the cities featured in the book to read a summary of each case. Here you will also find links to the many key agencies and firms involved in each of the projects profiled in the book.

Author Bios

David Gamble is a Lecturer in the Department of Urban Planning and Design and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He is a registered architect and certified urban planner and Principal of Gamble Associates based in Cambridge, MA. The practice focuses on urban revitalization and community development.

Patty Heyda is an Assistant Professor of Urban Design and Architecture at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. She conducts research on processes shaping contemporary urbanization through drawing, writing and design projects.

Methodology

Criteria of Rebuilding

In order to represent the greatest range of American cities, we selected projects and strategies that fit the following criteria:

Projects located in the city’s downtown.1.

Projects that are contemporary and substantially complete. While many projects in the book may have been conceptualized or initiated by as far back as the mid to late 1990s, for the purposes of our research, substantial components of the plan must have been realized by the time of publication even if they continue to be adapted by the forces that initially shaped them.

Projects that utilize a diverse range of planning tools and mechanisms for implementation.

Projects demonstrating a range of design innovation. We strived to avoid advancing a singular design aesthetic, highlighting instead the plurality of the design cultures at work today.

Projects that catalyze further redevelopment or transformation. Admittedly, it is difficult to fully define a project’s influence, and impact varies greatly depending on where they lie and for whom projects are intended.

In addition to the above criteria, we also sought to ensure the projects reflected:

A geographic distribution across the United States. We intentionally selected cities representing different regions and climates. In no way do we want to suggest that this list is complete. On the contrary, we will be forever haunted by great cities we have not been able to include in this compendium (Pittsburgh! Chicago! Boston! Los Angeles! Miami!).

A range of scales and economies. It was important to highlight cities sharing common trajectories, such as legacy cities that may be shrinking or economically stagnant (City, 2013), growth cities that are “booming” and global cities engaged in the transnational economic network (Sassen, 1991).

Compelling stories of how the projects were achieved. Rebuilding does not just represent our own viewpoints or the designers’ perspectives. The inclusion of “perspectives” behind each case provides intimate—and multiple— lenses to tell the stories of that project, its city and constituents and their co-evolutions (Erlich & Raven, 1964). We sought to call attention to the routine as well as the idiosyncratic details behind each project. Taken as a whole, the spectrum of cases exposes both achievements and pitfalls implicit in rebuilding cities. We sought to show the range of insights into the ways in which urban actors capitalize, defuse, deflect or avoid complexities.

A diversity of urban design and planning firms. Like the cities themselves, the project designers are intentionally diverse, representing both large and small practices and falling under (or blending across) diverse disciplinary categories spanning architecture, landscape architecture, landscape urbanism, urban design, development, building construction, economic development and municipal planning.

A full spectrum of urban design action. Urban design is a relatively young design discipline, conceived as a hybrid practice to blend capabilities of planning with formal considerations of architecture (Krieger, 2009). How one defines urban design varies even today, but general assumptions hold that the discipline involves conceptualizing permanent constructions or landscape systems incorporating multiple buildings, blocks or spaces with connections to infrastructural systems. We sought projects for this book that either embodied or challenged this traditional notion of urban design.

1.In some cases, such as San Antonio, St. Louis or Portland, the project area is not located directly in the downtown business core, but rather the general downtown area.

Rebuilding Projects Map

Click on the icons below to view the information and images for each location:

Atlanta, GA. BeltLine

In ATLANTA, Georgia, the BeltLine project transforms a derelict rail corridor surrounding the city into an extraordinary 22-mile (35.4-kilometer) greenway trail connecting neighborhoods, parks and transit systems to each other and to downtown. But this corridor is more than a 20-foot (6.1-meter) right of way. It defines the midline of a 1-mile (1.6-kilometer) wide swath of economic development encircling the entire city. Since its conception in 1999, the initiative has grown to encompass over 40 neighborhoods, generating $775 million in private investment along its length. The project becomes an expanded form of the “TOD” (transit-oriented development), where bike and pedestrian networks augment transit systems.

Birmingham, AL. Railroad Park

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama’s, Railroad Park is also based on 19th-century transportation infrastructure. The 19-acre central downtown park occupies the site of a former rail yard in the center of the city. It has become a connective landscape, relinking a divided downtown while catalyzing new housing, a minor-league baseball stadium, arts and culture venues and a recreational trail network. Active train lines still run on the park’s northern edge. Instead of walling off this gritty condition, the park embraces it as a celebration of its legacy—and Birmingham’s foundations. Where other cities return to their riverfronts, Birmingham proudly returns to its railfront.

Buffalo, NY.
Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus

In BUFFALO, New York, the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus (BNMC) Master Plan conceptualized a way to unify a number of burgeoning medical institutions under the umbrella “BNMC.” By concentrating development in the core of the campus and along a common spine, the BNMC alleviated institutional pressure on the seams it shared with its neighborhoods. The medical area’s new primary public space, a lush linear park, serves as a branding mechanism and seam stitching together the otherwise disparate buildings into a unified campus.

Chattanooga, TN. 21st Century Waterfront

The implementation of the 21st Century Waterfront in CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee, stands out since it was conceived and completed in a remarkably short three-year time span—within a single mayor’s term—through a well-orchestrated public-private relationship. The city leveraged the capacity of a nonprofit implementation corporation, called the River City Company, to streamline the project processes that would otherwise have taken much longer moving through the public sector alone. This structure highlights the notable capacity of the public-private partnership to transform American cities, but it also highlights the blurred roles and responsibilities between sectors that result from such joint arrangements. The River City Foundation was able to raise the funds it needed in less than three years by marshaling the support of the city’s largest foundations that pooled their resources (and donor lists). Chattanooga’s 21st Century Waterfront connected the local institutions for the first time, via a new waterfront park infrastructure but also via an overarching vision for the city.

Denver, CO. Union Station

DENVER, Colorado, embraced the redevelopment of its historic Union Station as the hub of a new multimodal, 122-mile (196-kilometer) transit network. The project changed the way the region reaches and moves around the downtown core. Transit program funding was pooled from a combination of tax levies and federal loans, and private development followed. The project’s success in attracting development—and repaying the loans—supports the public sector’s profound new confidence that its investments in urban improvements will return dividends in new development (Park, 2015). In Denver, the public-private partnership model (PPP) is amplified as the public-public-private partnership model (PPPP) (Tackacs, 2014), showing new public sector capacity not seen in decades in U.S. city-rebuilding.

Green Bay, WI. CityDeck

The CityDeck in GREEN BAY, Wisconsin, demonstrates thateven smaller cities can implement ambitious waterfront plans that then change people’s perceptions of downtown. The small, four-block-long linear park on the Fox River becomes a touchstone for the downtown, but also for the region, as it inscribes a new riverfront-based identity on a downtown that lacked a strong sense of place. The riverfront becomes a catalyst for surrounding redevelopment that then participates in the daily theater of the industrial working river.

Houston, TX. Buffalo Bayou

The Buffalo Bayou in HOUSTON, Texas, was originally a drainage canal for flood management. Passing decades reduced it from a regional resource to a polluted and overgrown corridor hidden under highways, snaking its way through the city. Today it is the center of a new connective landscape that rejoins the city under a highway network and creates an environment of sublime beauty. In 2001, a devastating flood in Houston inspired city leaders to launch long-term improvements to the storm water management and water quality of the Bayou. With support from Houston’s well-endowed private foundations, the water management plan is coupled with an open space agenda, seeding a number of remarkable downtown public parks as a result.

Louisville, KY. West Main Street

On Main Street in downtown LOUISVILLE, Kentucky, the city’s vulnerable collection of mid- to late-19th-century cast-iron buildings were poised for demolition. Instead, officials and designers used them as the premise for infrastructure enhancements spurring decades of rebuilding. Here, an arts district is anchored first by four blocks of public streetscape investment, which then attracted a wide range of arts and cultural uses back to Main Street. “The arts” as a thematic overlay enables a diversity of creative hybrid building uses along the street, including a factory/museum, a hotel/contemporary arts gallery and a bourbon distillery/museum. These non-traditional categories expand the notion of “making” into the spirit of the arts district they anchor.

In NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana, Tulane University’s City Center engages the community through small-scale projects run by Tulane Architecture School staff and students in collaboration with local partners. The rebuilding is not confined to a single area around the anchor university’s campus, but focused on where needs are throughout the city. In contrast to ambitious but largely unsuccessful “top-down” rebuilding planning efforts in New Orleans at that time, Tulane’s smaller, slower process of “radical incrementalism” (Etheridge & Taylor, 2013) becomes a more intimate model of institutional engagement, proving that propinquity is not always needed in order to establish a critical mass and effectuate meaningful change.

New York, NY. Brooklyn Bridge Park

Brooklyn Bridge Park in NEW YORK CITY unfolds across a series of abandoned, formerly industrial piers on the East River across from Manhattan. The park’s plantings and design features become literal buffers, mitigating storm surges and flooding from the river while mitigating noise and pollution from the highway on its other side. These measures reflect how cities are elevating landscape and architectural design in service of creating resilient infrastructure systems.

The park is built on an ambitious economic model that ties the funding of capital maintenance and operations of the park to private development within its edges. This public-private contract allowed New York City to create a public open space in Brooklyn that the city and state otherwise could not have afforded. The agreement stirs debate, where some still ask whether the benefits of a well-maintained new park for the public sector warrant the privatization of even small portions of the land. While New York City is an outlier city in this book, in terms of its size and role in the global economy,its Brooklyn Bridge Park project provides a canonical case highlighting the achievements and complexities involved in helping cities reclaim their riverfronts.

Philadelphia, PA. University of Pennsylvania PennConnects

In PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania, the University of Pennsylvania’s PennConnects framework plan for campus expansion included strategies to overcome infrastructural barriers, allowing the campus to reclaim land that historically cut the university off from the City Center and the banks of the Schuylkill River. As part of its growth process, the university stepped out of its “institutional” shoes to partner directly with real estate developers to redevelop interstitial properties for economic development and use off campus. This put the university in a different position relative to its context, where “town-gown” is no longer an oppositional construct, but an embedded one: “town” interlaces with “gown” as the institution becomes more directly a part of its community.

Portland, OR. South Waterfront

In PORTLAND,Oregon, the South Waterfront has gone from a partially contaminated and largely isolated industrial site to a major residential and research community, seamlessly connected by new transit. Urban designers in Portland’s sizable planning department worked with community landowners big and small to navigate the best ways the Oregon Heath and Sciences University might expand its hilltop campus to the working riverfront. Portland’s South Waterfront demonstrates the strong capacity of a public sector agency to carry out both an economic and an aesthetic vision for a new district that blends into an existing industrial riverfront. In Portland, a new aerial tram arcs across the hill, connecting districts under a sweeping new vision of the American city.

San Antonio, TX. Pearl Brewery

The Pearl Brewery district in SAN ANTONIO, Texas, reveals that preserving historic buildings and building anew on a large scale and in a contemporary fashion are not mutually exclusive. The Pearl is a new residential and retail neighborhood constructed on the campus of an abandoned brewery complex. To best showcase the historic buildings—but also to remain fully contemporary—the Pearl District developers turned down historic tax credits that made redevelopment overly restrictive in an effort to gain greater control. By avoiding labels that dictate what being “historic” means, new histories are layered on old, keeping the urban fabric alive, instead of locked into its past.

San Francisco, CA. PROXY

The third project, Proxy in Hayes Valley, SAN FRANCISCO, California, is a temporary urbanization of former surface parking lots. The initiative was conceived in 2008 as a strategy for waiting out the construction lull of an economic recession. Proxy is now both a public space and a small business incubator. Shops are housed in quirky open-air shipping containers that are neither buildings nor sheds, neither permanent nor completely temporary. Yet they become classified as buildings in local code, causing many unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles. The five-year (recently increased to 10-year) life span of the lively public and commercial space challenges altogether the assumption that rebuilding the city is about permanent construction.

St. Louis, MO. Botanical Heights

In McRee Town in ST. LOUIS, Missouri, organic infill development represents a slower, more contextual antidote to the top-down urban renewal strategies used frequently in the second half of the 20th century. In downtrodden McRee Town, one such dated urban renewal strategy eradicated six historic blocks as recently as the early 2000s. Only a few residents remained after the demolitions, but today the neighborhood is incrementally redeveloping with new and renovated homes and commercial and educational facilities. Current infill development is stabilizing the historic, long neglected neighborhood that has now been rebranded Botanical Heights. This case highlights the tenuous distinctions between “redevelopment” and “gentrification,” together with the malleable nature of terms such as “identity,” since the neighborhood’s moniker— a name embedded with the area’s long history—gets removed in the redevelopment process along with residents.